Independent Arts Writer & Curator

Over the last 12 months I have written 30,909 words, had 29 texts published, worked with 20 clients, and presented at 5 public speaking engagements (in parallel to working 1-3 days/week as an art administrator). It’s been a challenging year personally and professionally but I’ve really enjoyed the range of opportunities and experiences – here are some of the highlights of my 2017 calendar.

An apologetic selfie featuring the work of Juan Alcazaren in Art Informal’s stand at Art Fair Philippines, February 2017

MARCHAfter writing for the web edition for some time, my first print review for ArtAsiaPacific was published in Issue 102 of the Hong Kong-based magazine, covering Tatsuo Miyajima: Connect With Everything at MCA Australia.

ArtAsiaPacific, Issue 102, March-April 2017

APRIL
I headed to Kandos, a small town in the Central West of New South Wales, to cover the biennial grassroots Cementa Festival for ArtAsiaPacific and Art Monthly Australasia. It had everything from parkour to indigenous stargazing.

MAY-JUNE
This was a time for composing artists’ catalogue essays, notably for Ioulia Terizis’ show at Photoaccess, Canberra, Lucas Davidson at Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney, and Leahlani Johnson at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, NSW.

SEPTEMBER
September saw the first of my ‘In The Galleries’ column published in Art Monthly Australasia. It was a professional milestone to be invited to contribute a regular print column, previewing commercial shows in every state and territory around the country.

Art Monthly Australasia, Issue 301, September 2017

OCTOBERThe National Art School introduced their Launchpad professional development program, and as well as appearing on a panel discussion the previous month, in October I was invited to mentor students in the Biography Workshop.

NOVEMBERAnother international print milestone: my first review for Frieze, covering Diena Georgetti’s show at The Commercial, Sydney was published in Issue 191 of the London-based publication.

Frieze, Issue 191, November-December 2017

DECEMBER
As the year drew to a close I made my final edits to Bad Habits, a private publication celebrating the art collection of Bonita Croft and Gene Zemaitis. It was a privilege to again work with advisor and curator John Cruthers for this project.

2017 SURPRISE BONUS TRACK
In August, with the help of a translator, I gave a lecture on Art History & Aesthetics at the Sydney launch of Chinese permanent makeup brand Bicasso, complete with ribbon-cutting ceremony, and champagne sprayed Formula One-style on stage.

Cutting the ribbon with representatives of Bicasso and the Australia China Commercial Association (I’m second from right). Image: ACCA

Wishing you health, happiness and surprising art experiences in 2018. See you then!
– Chloé

It was a pleasure to be invited to Manila to cover Art Fair Philippines for Art Monthly Australasia. This complex city has an intriguing history and thriving art scene. My fair wrap-up was published in full in the April issue of the magazine with a preview on the AMA blog.

A few hundred words into writing this, I clicked ‘Save’ and Word suggested the filename ‘between accident and intent’ – a fragment of text still floating at the top of the page. It seems apt to embrace this chance title. While the intention of World Material was to explore the resonances within and between the works of these artists, many of the connections that have arisen during the show’s subsequent development and installation have been surprising and even uncanny. The expanded material, spatial, geographic and conceptual potentials of these works collide at a number of points.

Fictions are employed in order to reveal new truths. Louise Weaver’s paintings might appear to be encased in the bubble wrap and packing tape that would have protected them in storage or transit, but are actually constructed from ‘skins’ of paint that have been built up on another surface before being applied to canvas as abstract colour fields. Like Weaver, Connie Anthes confounds expectations in her construction of a painting’s surface, her work Untitled (Shadow Figures) employing a soft sculpture as a stencil, with the perceived depth of the resulting two-dimensional impression disrupted by a scattering of flatly-painted glyphs. The River Red Gum ‘branches’ nestled among Yasmin Smith’s Ntaria Fence are actually slip-cast ceramic proxies, glazed with wood ash collected from the same area of Hermannsburg, Central Australia as the branches themselves.

Like Smith, Lotte Schwerdtfeger and Rebecca Gallo also present expanded understandings of landscape through the materials and forms they employ. Using natural clay sourced from the goldrush-ravaged Fryers Forest region of Victoria, Schwerdtfeger houses pieces of shattered local bedrock in specially-shaped plinths, interspersed with conventional pottery forms evoking a human presence. In Gallo’s sculptural installations, objects that once lay inert in places like Hill End, Fowlers Gap, Emu Plains and Sydney’s inner west have been reactivated, carefully incorporated into totemic compositions that are both fragile and playful.

The perfectly mundane is conjured into significance in the hands of these artists. In Gallo’s works a fine balance is quite literally struck between found, carved and cast objects; An upturned ice-cream container rests jauntily on one of Smith’s Red Gum branches; In Weaver’s hands the trappings of a gallery stockroom become a lunar surface; Michelle Nikou transforms clothes dryer lint into domestic motifs; The notorious Mac ‘spinning wheel of death’ hypnotises in Anthes’ Mantle Piece.

The folding and unfolding of planes that occurs in Mantle Piece, as a three-dimensional object is flattened into two dimensions then reprojected onto itself, creates an ambiguity in spatial comprehension. To do this Anthes uses orthographic projection, a technique that has been employed since antiquity to map star systems. Lisa Sammut’s work form deforms you is also a spatial map, in which organic and geometric motifs are connected atop an indigo velvet surface to create a sense of cosmic time, distance and scale.

The flat-sided forms in Sammut’s microcosmic cosmos feature painted or collaged surfaces which transform their diorama-like simplicity into dimensional portals. Eloïse Kirk also employs collage, exploring its intersection with painting in abstracted landscapes that are forged in the connections between organic elements and in the space between the romantic and the surreal. The title of her painting Ultra Plinian alludes to volcanic eruptions, and a geological form in the centre of the composition oozes black resin.

World Material brings together the work of Australian artists whose works explore the spaces between strength and delicacy, between the material and the conceptual, between accident and intent, between the real and the fictional, and between representation and abstraction – embodying an exploration, recontextualisation, and sometimes deliberate obfuscation of natural, found and human-made materials. The exhibition is intended as an exploration of these tensions, suggesting totem-like resonances within and between the works of these artists.

Images of the exhibition are here, artists biographies here, and exhibition text here.

The show runs from 28 January – 28 February 2017. If you are in Sydney I hope you can make it.

Phew! My last few writing deadlines for the year are out of the way, just in the nick of time. I am honoured to be invited to Delhi by TAKE on art Magazine to join a great bunch of artists, writers and curators from around the world for ‘The Book – Ensemble’.

Curated by TAKE editor and publisher Bhavna Kakar and curator and assistant editor for TAKE, Anushka Rajendran, the Ensemble will, over the course of two days, exchange ideas and discuss the endurance and material legacy of ‘The Book’, including the ways in which it continues to influence contemporary processes of knowledge, community and history.

I’ve been writing up a storm lately but had nothing published to show for it! Well as they say, it never rains but it pours. Here are a few of my recent missives that have finally hit the [digital] news stands:

Exhibition essays:It’s always great to collaborate with artists on their exhibition or catalogue essays. Here are a couple of recent texts:The work of art in the age of digital reproduction, Kate Tucker exhibition essay published by Galerie pompom, October 2016
Lara Merrett: Casus Fortuitus, exhibition essay published by Karen Woodbury Gallery, August 2016

ArtAsiaPacific:I added a new string to my bow when I began writing for ArtAsiaPacific earlier this year. Some of my reviews included:After Voices: Jompet Kuswidananto, review published in ArtAsiaPacific, August 2016Invisible Forces, blog published in ArtAsiaPacific, 27 July 2016Constant Negative: Kenzee Patterson, review published in ArtAsiaPacific, July 2016Review: When Silence Falls at Art Gallery of NSW, in ArtAsiaPacific, pub. 6 April 2016

Voice of the artist:The Copyright Agency released an excellent publication called Voice of the artist, co-ordinated by Nick Garner and edited by Tristan Chant. I loved putting together the essays The Hero Image andThe Rise of the forgery: how the internet has increased instances of forgery and the misattribution of artworks – a change of pace from an exhibition-based writing focus.

Hong Kong missives:I’ve visited Hong Kong a few times but nothing could prepare me for the behemoth art fair that is Art Basel HK. Here are the missives I filed once I’d recovered from Fair Fatigue:Confronting the nature of representation: ‘Afterwork’ at ParaSite, review published in Art Monthly Australasia, Issue 289, May 2016, pp.68-69Art Basel Hong Kong and Art Central, report published in Vault, Issue 14, May 2016, p.14Australian galleries seduce viewers at Art Basel Hong Kong, in ArtsHub, pub. 5 April 2016

In the fourth of this annual series, ArtChat featured a line-up of established and emerging independent curators who are all working with contemporary practice across the visual arts, craft and design, time-based and experimental arts. The evening explored imaginative ideas in a fast-paced, invigorating and sometimes humorous format, providing a snapshot of the exciting curatorial projects proposed by today’s creative thinkers.

Speakers included Joanna Bayndrian, Bec Dean, Micheal Do, Danielle Robson, Nina Stromqvist, Una Rey and myself. You can watch mine above (please turn up the volume – my voice was not being kind to me that day!), and view all the presentations on the MGNSW website.

Though a little nervous about presenting I enjoyed the night and it was great to showcase one of my ideas-in-progress to a wider audience. Thanks to Museums and Galleries of NSW and Regional and Public Galleries of NSW for the opportunity.

I have the honour of being awarded the second Dominik Mersch Gallery Curator Award. My exhibition ‘tensions/translations/transitions’ will bring together work by six artists employing physical and psychological markers and layers to evoke the tensions, translations and transitions occurring in our relationships with space and place. In bringing together these works I question if perhaps new or unexpected tensions, translations or transitions will emerge to the viewer.

In January I was invited to Singapore to experience Art Week – my second such trip in as many years. I covered the major South-East Asian fair Art Stage Singapore, as well as the exhibition Time of Othersat Singapore Art Museum, for Art Monthly. While I was there I also explored the recently unveiled National Gallery of Singapore, checked out the respected Singapore Tyler Print Institute, and, along with many others, braved the rain during cultural precinct Gillman Barracks’ Art After Dark. Highlights of that experience included the Joan Jonas survey exhibition They come to us without a word at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, and Antipodean Inquiry, curated by Owen Craven at Yavuz Gallery.

Gillman was also occupied by a collection of shipping containers re-purposed as exhibition spaces by emerging Singaporean artists. It was great to see Singapore’s cultural life on the up-and-up and I hope to have the opportunity to return next year to see how things are evolving.

The pieces I wrote in response to Time of Others and Art Stage can be read in the March 2016 edition of Art Monthly, which marks a turning point in the magazine’s history as it widens its focus to Australia and the Asia-Pacific. The March issue is an Asian special exploring Australia’s historic and contemporary engagement with Asia across the visual arts, in celebration of the magazine’s newly expanded masthead. It’s humbling to be in printed company with such contributors as Russell Storer and Mami Kataoka – I hope you have a chance to check out the newly re-titled Art Monthly Australasia.